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IN recent years, particularly during her one-woman stage show Wishful Drinking (2008-2011), Carrie Fisher has fearlessly addressed pretty much everything: love, death, Star Wars (1977), Princess Leia, her divorce, her parents, The Blues Brothers (1980) and bipolar disorder. Is there anything, anything at all, that she won’t discuss publicly? “Yes, but it has nothing to do with me,” the 56-year-old actress-novelistscreenwriter says. “I won’t get into anything that would embarrass someone else. And it doesn’t have to be something serious – someone just asked me, ‘Who’s funnier, Paul Simon or Dan Aykroyd?’ You can’t answer questions like that. Or I can’t.
“Then there are questions that sound simple, but are tough questions,” she continues.
“They’re kind of like trick questions.
“And I’m not a big fan of feminine-hygiene questions.” Fisher is, however, a major fan of Christmas. That’s in large part why she signed on for her latest project, the Hallmark Channel original movie It’s Christmas, Carol!, set to air on November 18. A spin on Charles Dickens’ classic A Christmas Carol, it stars Emmanuelle Vaugier as Carol Huffman, the cold-hearted boss at a Chicago book publisher. On a memorable Christmas Eve, Carol not only runs into an ex-boyfriend (Tygh Runyan), who reminds her of the life she might have led, but also the ghost of her beloved boss, Eve (Fisher), who promptly takes Carol on a journey of discovery through her past, present and future.
“Christmas is my favourite holiday,” Fisher says, speaking by telephone from the balcony of a Texas hotel. “Certainly I like it better than my birthday, especially at this point. I’m hugely involved in Christmas. This came along, and it was sweet. Plus I’m playing a ghost. Any time there are no boundaries, I’m excited.
“I think I’m actually well suited to play a ghost,” she adds, “and I have no idea why. I guess it’s because it’s eccentric. So anything that’s eccentric, that’s fun. Plus a ghost is like a shadowy version of magic. Yet again, another reason to be interested in this.” Anyone watching It’s Christmas, Carol! will notice that many of Fisher’s lines, and Vaugier’s reactions to them, feel in-themoment and off-the-cuff. Fisher confirms that the filmmakers gave her the green light to adlib as she saw fit.
“That was one of the things they were nice about, letting me do that,” she says. “We were just talking about the boundaries being removed when you play a ghost. If the boundaries are removed, it has to be like that with the dialogue as well. That helped make it a fun shoot.
“And it was fun even though it involved trailers in a weird part of Canada,” Fisher adds.
“We were able to transcend all of that.” Most of Fisher’s scenes in It’s Christmas, Carol! pair her with Vaugier. The older actress speaks highly of Vaugier, a striking brunette best known for the films Saw II (2005) and Saw IV (2007), and for recurring roles on Two and a Half Men (2005-2011) and CSI: NY (2006-2009).
“I loved Emmanuelle, but she’s soooo much taller than I am,” says Fisher, who at 5-foot-1 is eight inches shorter than Vaugier. “She laughs like someone from a 1930s movie. You know the way people laugh when they’re holding a glass of drinks? There’s something very elegant about her. There’s something very ..
other than I am.
“Emmanuelle is elegant,” the actress says.
“She looks like she doesn’t make any effort in dressing, but she comes together so well. We were very opposite in that sense. She’s a great girl.” Fisher is practically shouting now, struggling to overcome both a whipping wind and the yelping of a nearby dog. The wind is easily avoided by stepping back into her hotel room from the balcony. The barking, well, that’s another story.
“That’s my dog, Gary, biting me and barking,” Fisher says apologetically. “The thing is that he was on a plane for three hours. So this is him explaining to me that he wants to order from room service. I’ve never seen him this upset, but he always wants to be the centre of attention.
“I don’t know why, but I’ve gotten more involved with this dog than I have with the many, many dogs I’ve had in my life,” she adds. “He’s a French bulldog.” Fisher soothes Gary as the conversation turns to her other current project, a new onewoman, semi-scripted show entitled Any Questions? In late October she presented it in a limited run at Brea Improv, in Brea, California, and she may tour with it in the months to come.
“It’s a little bit of a free-for-all,” Fisher says.
“Part of Wishful Drinking had a Q&A exchange, and it was always one of the most fun parts of the show to do, because it makes the show – odd word, anyway – more interactive, and you don’t know where it’s going to go.
In terms of it being scripted, it is in the sense that my life is what it is.
“I guess how I reply to people’s questions depends on how the questions are asked.” Does Fisher have her eye on Broadway? After all, in 2009 Wishful Drinking scored a hit there and earned her a Drama Desk nomination for Outstanding Solo Performance.
“I haven’t thought about it yet,” she replies.
“I have to see what this show is like. I’m hoping this show will shape itself as it goes along.
As I didWishful Drinking on and on and on, it took on a life of its own. My life would keep happening and different stories would emerge.
So I’d hope that will happen with this one, too, and we’ll see what it evolves into.” Beyond the show, Fisher is adapting her novel The Best Awful There Is (Simon & Schuster, 2004) into a television movie and contemplating ideas for a new book. She also hopes that It’s Christmas, Carol! will remind producers and directors that she’s alive, well and available for more acting jobs.
“I understand that I’m kind of not that easy to cast, in a way, because I remind people too much of myself,” Fisher says, laughing. “So you don’t want to keep doing that over and over again, but, yeah, I like acting.
“I don’t think of myself, really, as an actor in that sense that people really do when they get into character to the extent that it’s almost difficult to get out,” she adds. “But I do enjoy acting, especially if there aren’t as many boundaries.” She’s also comfortable with the fact that, 35 years after Star Wars came out, there are legions of people who will never think of her as anyone but the 21-year-old Princess Leia. She regularly appears at Star Wars-related events, including a recent stint signing autographs at the New York Comic-Con.
“It’s fun and sometimes it’s endless, like life,” Fisher says. “Usually the people are very sweet, but bizarre things will happen.
Somebody will come up and sob and say, ‘I’m where I’m at in my life because of you.’
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